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Monday, November 10, 2008

Anyone interested in using online activism against the death penalty should take a look at the new book, CauseWired: Plugging In, Getting Involved, Changing the World. It is about using online activism to change the world. The author, Tom Watson, also has a blog that is worth a look. He says that Obama's election was "the product of the most socially-wired campaign in American history. In a victory that holds deep lessons for how nonprofit organizations and cause-driven ventures will organize volunteers and build support in the future, Barack Obama was elected President of the United States Tuesday in a near-landslide victory keyed by state-of-the-art social networking and online organizing."

The website SocialActions is also a great place to find useful social activism services. It has a guide to 30 website platforms that can be used for online activism. Another source is MobileActive.org, which concentrates on using cell phones for social change.

If you run an anti-death penalty website, you might take a look at some of the online services that TMN uses and implement them on your own sites.

TMN was an early adopter of online activism from our start back in 2000. Our first website, created using phpWebSite, allowed us to make blog posts long before the word "blog" became popular. We have sinced starting using Blogger as our main blog while keeping our main website at texasmoratorium.org. In addition to our own blog, we reach a larger audience by posting occasionally about death penalty issues on other community blog sites, such as DailyKos and Burnt Orange Report.

Every anti-death penalty organization can share news and action alerts on each others websites by creating a news feed using a service such as Google Reader. Then you include the RSS feeds from other anti-death penalty organizations. You can see an example on the right of our blog and main website. Capital Defense Weekly is a site that uses RSS feeds very well.

We have also used Democracy in Action to let our supporters send messages to the Texas governor, members of the legislature and the board of pardons and paroles. During the campaign for Kenneth Foster, more than 6,000 messages were sent through our DIA-powered alert. We have also used DIA to collect petition signatures. DIA is a system that you have to pay for. Most of the other systems we use are free.

Many campaigns use the Care2 Petition Site, but that system doesn't allow you to download the complete contact information of the people who sign, so that is a weakness with Care2. Another option that does allow you to download all the contact information is Ipetitions.com, which we used to create this petition for a federal death penalty moratorium.

We most recently started using Amazee.com, which is currently running a membership contest that if our "Abolish the Death Penalty" project could win. If our "Abolish the Death Penalty" project has the most members on Amazee by Jan 22, we could win up to $5,000 to use against the death penalty.

We are developing a new tool using CauseCaller to allow people to call the governor and members of the Texas Legislature. It should be ready by January. We might also use it to allow people to call members of the U.S. Congress and the new president to push for a federal moratorium.

If you think we have been doing a good job using online social activism tools, especially for an all-volunteer organization, please vote for us in the